Day 18 - A little bit more Big Little Lies; Vault 7 (?)

I kept thinking about Big Little Lies, I completed reading it yesterday and I
fell for Celeste White (who is called Celeste Wright in the TV series). Madeline
is of course a different kind of a person, the exact opposite of Celeste in a
lot of ways, but they are friends still because Celeste doesn’t talk too much,
stays silent most of the time, disoriented and always late. Whereas Madeline is
talks all the time, takes on people and causes. What a character!

The entry scene for Celeste (Nicole Kidman) in the show, glorious with her
forehead frills and lost expression, is good! But it isn’t in slow motion! I was
SO eager to see that scene in slow motion. This is generally what happens
whenever you read a book, and have a scene in your mind and then, the movie or
the TV series doesn’t really show exactly what you had in mind.
Disappointment. (Case in point: Dark Places, the scene where the girls and the
mom realize that their brother and son (Ben Day) has colored his hair black
where the common thread in all of them is their red hair. This scene is
incredibly emotional and chaotic, even in the book. And in the movie, it’s
literally a breeze. Not even a big deal.)

The other episode I managed to watch today was Homeland’s 6.7. It was one hell
of an episode, with some major betrayals! The turn that the show has taken from
characters not liking each other to characters actively plotting against each
other is incredibly disturbing. Twisting facts, pointing and aiming people at
each other like countries do with their missiles, it’s incredibly dark! Homeland
has been dark before, but it was always about the situation, the characters were
never in conflict with each other for imaginary stuff. This time, they are.

The
CIA/Wikileaks story today is about getting malware onto phones, none of the
exploits are in Signal or break Signal Protocol encryption.

This is millions of lines of code and emails that WikiLeaks has
said under a project called Vault 7. This
apparently has some documents that talk about targetted attacks on iOS and
Android. Curiously, there isn’t anything about Blackberry or BBM. BBM uses a
proprietary protocol owned by RIM, and of course, the userbase for Blackberry is
so low now that they probably didn’t want to spend any time on a dying platform,
still. Blackberry is still (probably) safe because attacks haven’t been designed
against it.

Of course, all these attacks require the smart TV, phone, computer to be
connected to the internet. The easiest way perhaps then, is to disconnect as
much as possible. Use a VPN whenever connected, and constantly keep checking
that the wrong ports aren’t open on your machine. nmap -Pn localhost should
always say All 1000 scanned ports on localhost are closed